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“When the Israelis pick up guns, or the Poles, or the Irish, or any white man in the world says ‘Give me liberty or give me death,’ the entire white world applauds. When a black man says exactly the same thing, word for word, he is judged a criminal and treated like one and everything possible is done to make an example of this bad nigger so there won’t be any more like him.“ 

I’m a librarian in the Washington DC area, and for years, my library has been working on a project to preserve our collection of VHS tapes. This week, we finished digitizing the last videotape on-site for a total of 2250 videos that we can make available to our patrons again.

We have a collection of over 8000 VHS tapes, including lots of documentaries and educational films. For obvious reasons, our patrons can’t access them anymore. VHS is undergoing what has been called “degralescence” – degradation and obsolescence. The tapes are deteriorating, and the format is becoming more obsolete. Fewer new TVs even have the video inputs for VHS players.

For the most part, these tapes aren’t unique. They’re commercial videotapes, which means compared to one-of-a-kind video collections, they’re a low priority to digitize. But if we don’t do it, who will? If not now, when? So we did it.

Under Section 108© of US copyright law, libraries are allowed to make a reproduction of a copyrighted work, as long as 1) there are no new replacements for sale and 2) the original format is degrading, damaged, or obsolete. There’s more to it than that, but basically, as far as VHS is concerned, if it’s not being sold anymore, we can digitize it!

With lots of help from our student staff, we audited the collection and found that we had about 4000 videos that qualified. A huge chunk of those were being kept in off-site storage. The remaining 2200+ were on-site, and that’s what we finished digitizing this week.

It took a lot of time. VHS digitization happens in real-time, so an hour-long tape takes one hour to capture.

In total, that comes out to 37 TB of video, compressed! Here’s our storage arrays:

This is a big achievement for us, and it hasn’t been an automatic process. Preservation takes work. There’s a lot of human labor involved, especially in A/V preservation, with manual processing and attention needed for individual videos. We listened to experts and found how to make it work in our time and budget.

The project is still ongoing. In addition to everything we have to digitize from off-site storage, we have to keep maintaining the digital video collection. Digital storage is volatile, and we have to ensure we have backups and that we keep it in an accessible format. Preservation is never in the past tense. A thing is never preserved. We’re always preserving.

(And of course the generation who raised us loves to act fake shocked like “my grandkids don’t know how to boil water” like yeah, Janice, that’s because you took your kids out to eat 6 nights a week and baked Stouffers lasagna one night)

And now we are broke. And can’t afford to pay $60 to have every pair of pants we own hemmed (shoutout to shorties!). We are making yogurt because we can’t afford to pay $2.50 for one yogurt.

I’ve learned to knit to make myself wool hats and scarves. I’ve learned to sew so I can make items that would otherwise cost me 4x the cost to make it. I’ve learned to make yogurt because I would prefer to spend $2 for a gallon of milk and get 24 yogurts out of it rather than just one.

I’ve planted fruit trees in my yard so I can reduce the carbon footprint of the fruit I eat, and because produce is expensive.

I raise egg-laying chickens so I don’t contribute to factory farming.

My husband hunts deer so that we can eat lean, virtually fat free meat, and also not contribute to factory farming. The deer live happy lives and are not allowed to suffer. (Hey PS also, hunting up here plays an important role in ecology, as otherwise the deer population would explode, and deer would starve in the winter. Thanks for coming to my TEDta…)

Now, there’s a nightly tourist attraction that uses these lasers, sized up multiple times. There is nothing inherently offensive or dangerous about these tiny laser pens, mainly used for stargazing.

So what do the people do?

They come out, to the planetarium (another popular use for these lasers) and they all shine a spectacular laser show to:

1). show their dissatisfaction for baseless arrests

2). display that there’s nothing dangerous about these lasers

3). they try to set the entire planetarium on fire with the very vicious glare of multiple lasers (it did not work)

4). also to satisfy the urge to shine a flashlight at a planetarium and make shadow dogs out of their hands

5). they’ve also turned it into an impromptu disco with song requests being taken, neon beachballs being tossed around, a public karaoke session

6). They also attempt to set a newspaper on fire via the sheer offensive firepower of multiple lasers singled upon one target. Newsflash, it didn’t work.

7). They also attempt to light a cigarette, to no avail.